WHY A UNIFIED APPROACH IS ESSENTIAL FOR ASSET MANAGEMENT?
It is trendy these days to talk about digital transformation, although the term tends to mean something a bit different to each person you speak to.
In the simplest of terms, to us it means that if you deploy technology to gather information on your business, you will find ways to improve.
A pretty clear example of that would be in the realm of Asset Management, where a better understanding of the location, state, and utilization of various enterprise assets can lead to dramatic benefits.
Whether it results in improved operational efficiency, lower costs, better compliance or simply improved customer satisfaction, the benefits are typically well understood.
So why then does it seem to be so difficult to find examples of fully scaled, enterprise-level, asset tracking and management systems that have been successfully deployed? The answer may be a bit counter intuitive.
THE PROBLEM OF FRAGMENTED APPROACHES
Let’s take a situation where a company wishes to track their reusable plastic containers that products are shipped in. Several solutions are available that specifically target this use case. After a significant effort to install, configure and deploy the solution, the customer will start to see the benefits associated with tracking their reusable assets.
So, what happens when the company tries to direct this momentum towards another asset management use case, for example, the tracking of internal tools? The problem they face is that there is essentially nothing at all to leverage from the container project that can be applied to this new use case. They are forced to repeat the process entirely, with the same level of effort and cost, to achieve similar results. The barriers of implementation have not been lowered at all.
TRUE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION REQUIRES A UNIFIED APPROACH
The industry best practice is to strategically approach it in a holistic manner, viewing the data collection system for asset management as INFRASTRUCTURE, not unique enterprise applications or closed platforms.
This is why Coppernic recommends an asset tracking system based upon the Unified Namespace architecture implemented using an MQTT broker.
Once you understand this approach, you can begin to visualize an Open and Composable data capture solution for all the asset management needs in your business.
All the disadvantages of vendor-specific, closed systems go away, and the benefits of being able to build incremental value through new use cases becomes obvious.
HOW DO YOU GET STARTED?
What does this mean to companies who are struggling with how they should approach Digital Transformation initiatives?
In order to begin this voyage properly, companies need to avoid the shiny ‘bells and whistles’ of enterprise software application providers and IOT platform vendors and take the first steps towards a unified information approach.
As most companies have some type of clear asset management need, start with a small UNS pilot or proof of concept (POC) by implementing an MQTT broker in parallel to your existing information systems. Evaluate, iterate and scale this asset information infrastructure to cover the various needs throughout the enterprise, all the while preparing for advanced AI-based data analytics on your data sets in the future.
